Launching "the most sophisticated space science telescope ever constructed" into space is a complex process, and testing is a huge part of it. The James Webb Space Telescope's intricate hardware and technical systems ...

Travel into the rainforest of Pimpilala, Ecuador with conservation educator and naturalist Phil Torres as he looks for butterflies with Dr. Susan Finkbeiner. As an entomologist and evolutionary biologist, she uses the...

Oxygen forms about 21% of the air around us. In your body, oxygen forms a vital role in the production of energy in most cells. But if gases can only efficiently diffuse across tiny distances, how does oxygen reach th...

Snow crystals form when humid air is cooled to the point that molecules of water vapor start sticking to each other. In the clouds, crystals usually start forming around a tiny microscopic dust particle, but if the wa...

The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) spends its days buried in sand and its nights stalking prey in the shallow waters off the coast of Hawaii. Just because the squid hunts at night, however, doesn’t mean th...

You dive down into a undersea meadow. Surrounded by blades of seagrass up to a meter tall, you begin to notice the abundant life all around. Schools of baby fish hide within the grassy maze as emerald sea slugs graze ...

Your research team has found a prehistoric virus preserved in the permafrost and isolated it for study. After a late night working, you’re just closing up the lab when a sudden earthquake hits and breaks all the sampl...

Sand pendulums are an easy and beautiful method for students of all ages to learn a bit about the harmonic motion. These devices are easy to build and can be adjusted to give a variety of patterns. A pendulum that beg...

From the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), providing a very wide field-of-view, view Earth's moon from all sides. It was created from 110,000 high-resolution WAC images that were digit...

The bacteria in our guts can break down food the body can’t digest, produce important nutrients, regulate the immune system, and protect against harmful germs. And while we can’t control all the factors that go into m...

Volcanologist Carolyn Parcheta builds and tests Volcano bots, sturdy and compact robots that can explore inside volcanoes. Her team is developing these two-wheeled explorers to learn more about how magma moves and how...

In 2016, bricklayers in Teralba, NSW Australia filmed their domino-style technique for capping a concrete brick wall. The video went viral thanks to the surprising second part of the chain reaction: After the bricks f...

Hiding in plain sight and deceptively still, treehoppers have evolved an ingenious way to communicate—using a complex series of vibrations. Now, scientists are listening in and starting to crack the treehopper code. A...

In a feat of DIY time lapse filmmaking at a microscopic scale, wildlife filmmaker and photographer Francis Chee captured the cell division of a Rana temporaria common frog egg. Watch it transform from a few cells to.....

With no leaves and no chlorophyll, Southern Africa's Hydnora africana is a underground-dwelling parasitic plant in that gets all of its sugars, minerals, and water by attaching to the roots of Euphorbia plants. It als...

On her dive days as a marine biologist for The Bay Foundation, Ariadne Reynolds is usually scuba diving in the Santa Monica Bay for three 1-1.5 hour stretches as she observes urchins and kelp growth, and measures ever...